Impostor syndrome

I think one of the reasons why I'm so prone to catastrophic thinking is that I've always had the impostor syndrome: I've never believed my generally good luck, always thought I wasn't worthy of it, so there's this feeling that it's going to run out one day soon. And if I can't come up with any personal mechanism for that to happen, why, there's always total economic collapse, giant asteroid strikes, earthquakes, nuclear war or a fascist takeover.

As I get older I'll probably lose a lot of that, because as all the systems in my body start slowly breaking down there will be much simpler ways for my luck to run out, ready at hand; and I'll probably figure that I won't live to see the really big catastrophes.

A possible corollary is that people with greatly elongated natural lifespans will do a lot of worrying about gigantic civilization-wide disasters. I suppose that this is one of the things that Greg Egan's Diaspora was about.

aargh

From another one of those "Bush doing great now" stories in the WaPo:

[...]But when matched against the president, Dean fares badly, both in a hypothetical trial heat and on who is trusted to handle both national security and domestic issues. Even many Democrats said they still know little about Dean or his views.

The poll findings show why many Democrats are nervous about Dean as a potential candidate against Bush.

Then, a little further down:

No other Democrat was tested against Bush in the Post-ABC poll.

Control group? What control group?

I'm starting to sound like a Dean fanatic here. Really, I'm not; I think he'd be about a hundred times as good a president as Bush, and I admire his campaign, but the guy has a tendency to shoot his mouth off unwisely that bothers me. On personality alone, I lean toward Clark. But I'm becoming really annoyed with the prevalence of the "Dean will get stomped but Democrat X would win" story; I believed it myself a year ago because it sounded plausible, but there is as yet no actual evidence for it.

The Saddam bounce hasn't changed the fact that when polls match specific Democratic candidates against Bush, they all do about the same, except that Clark often does better by a point or two, not nearly enough to close the current gap. Comparing Dean to an unnamed Democrat is misleading, because specific challengers always look bad in those comparisons.

Meanwhile, I agree with Ruy Texeira about the bounce itself. He adds the interesting information that even Bush's popular support on domestic economics spiked temporarily during the Iraq war. I think Texeira tends to cherry-pick the most optimistic information he can find about Democratic hopes, but he's right here. If Bush wins it probably won't be because of any specific big event; it will be because he managed to hold onto that solid floor he has so far at about 51 or 52 percent.

A while back the Onion ran a joke about a public opinion poll about opinions of public opinion. As usual, the story was only about a millimeter off reality. I think it's fascinating, though, to see the large difference that can exist between what people think and what people think that people think. The tendency seems to be to assume that big, dramatic events mostly drive public opinion; when actually it takes a cataclysm like the WTC/Pentagon attacks to have any great lasting effect, even that fades, and the long-term trends are mostly driven by economics and general cultural attitudes.

Sliding scale

The strange thing is, though I'm clearly the precise age described in "YOU'RE LOST BETWEEN A BABY BOOMER AND A GEN X'ER IF...", I also remember when I was supposed to be "Generation X". Further evidence that the designation somehow applied to younger people every year for about a decade.

By the way, Yahmdallah's weblog is pretty entertaining. I hope he considers me one of the non-bullying atheists. (I suspect that we aren't actually a minority of atheists; we just don't make a lot of noise about it unless prodded.)

Are you listening, everybody???

Oh, yeah, I remember why I was originally going to link to Yahmdallah's site. Though I do not necessarily agree with all this 100%, it is pretty funny:

What I did not like is any of the science fiction books I've picked up this year. I sloughed through a recent anthology of "great modern sci-fi" that provided in the intro notes to each story the interesting slant of how it fits in the current overly-political pantheon of current sci-fi writer opinion. Evidently there's this ongoing war of ideas bobbing beneath the surface (like turds in a septic tank) of sci-fi, and it's believed that you have to have the right politics underneath your story to be considered valid by some of more hard-core scribes. (See Orwell's theories on language - or, heck, compare and contrast Fox News to BBC News and so on.)

Well, hell. No wonder most of it sucks. Guys and gals of science fiction: Get over this. No one but you cares about genderless dystopias (or worse, multi-gender dystopias where you may never know the true gender of what you are fucking); perfect Darwinian historical expressions and/or genetically-futzed-with human/animals; science gone so wrong we all wear shapeless gray and tan clothes, shave our heads, have rotten teeth, and have been reduced back to a barter system economy. Aren't you as tired of writing this dreck as we are of reading it? Consider this: Maybe something good will happen in the future. Maybe people LIKE being boys and girls - not to mention human. Maybe there will be neat gadgets, new ideas, great adventures and such in the future rather than a big nanotechnology biomass meltdown. (Nanotechnology will never work anyway. You just watch. If something is so small we can't build a detection system to accurately monitor it, then we can't build it.) Finally, religion is not your enemy. The sooner you grasp that, the better your stories will be.